The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

Then it was the Pruitt girls on their way to their grandma’s, and then a man I did not know from the co-op who must have heard from Dustin, and then two cars from church.

Every one of them slowed down. Every one of them looked at the stumps behind us, and then at us.

Nobody had to explain anything. That is the thing about a gravel road. Everybody on it already knew whose skidder had been on that slope in November.

They just had not had to look at it. Now they had to look at two nurses in scrubs working in the mud beside it.

By eleven we were on number thirty-nine. My hands were numb. Kayla had mud up to her elbows.

Megan had stopped twice to sit on the tailgate beside Beau and rest her back, and both times she straightened his hat.

Then I heard the diesel coming down the hill.

Everybody on our road knows the sound of Wayne’s truck. It has a knock in it he has been meaning to fix for five years.

I have heard it every morning and every evening since we moved out there, and I knew it before it came over the rise.

He came down the hill slow. Slower than I had ever seen him drive it.

He was coming back from somewhere, not going to work, and I wondered later whether somebody had called him. I never asked. I still do not know.

The truck rolled to a stop right across from the last empty hole.

Kayla stood up beside me with the bucket in her hand. Megan got off the tailgate and put herself between the truck and the baby without seeming to think about it. I stayed on my knees with the shovel across my lap.

The driver’s door opened. Wayne got out and stood in the road. He looked at the trees first, all thirty-nine of them, thin and bare in a long straight line down the fence.

Then he looked past them at the stumps. Then he looked at the tailgate.

I do not know how long he stood there. Long enough that the engine knocked a few times and went quiet.

Long enough that Kayla glanced at me, and I shook my head a little, because I did not know what he was going to do either.

Then he walked around to the back of his truck and reached over the side of the bed and came out with a shovel.

He did not say a word. He crossed the ditch and came down the line to the last hole.

He looked at me, and at the last sapling lying beside it in the wet grass, and I nodded.

So he planted it. He held it straight with one hand and shoveled the dirt in with the other, the way a man does who has planted things his whole life.

He knelt in the mud in his work pants and spread the roots out with his fingers. He packed the dirt down with the heel of his hand.

Kayla poured the water. Nobody said anything. When he was done, he stayed down on one knee beside it with his hand flat on the ground, and his shoulders started to go, and I realized Wayne Kolb was crying.

“Day forty,” Kayla said quietly. “That’s the day he came home.”